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KIRKUS REVIEW

The fourth case of Bruges Commissioner Pieter Van In to reach
these shores, originally published in Belgium in 1998, pins the raffish cop
between a covey of Satanists and a very pregnant wife.

There’s no sign of violence on the body of Trui Andries when
she’s found in a shallow ditch at the side of the out-of-the way neighborhood
of the Singel. But there’s no sign of water in her lungs either. So she must
have been poisoned, concludes amusingly arrogant crime-scene tech Raf Geens, who
gleefully announces the agent: tetramethylammonium pyrosulphate. Trui’s much
younger boyfriend, Jonathan Leman, scarcely has time to link her to both the
Suffer Little Children orphanage and the local Church of Satan, from which he
claims they both escaped, before he vanishes. Van In’s most promising lead,
Satanist Jasper Simons, is even less helpful; carried off to the hospital, he
refuses to talk, then takes a header out a sixth-floor window. But all this is
only a warm-up for a spectacular machine-gun attack that claims the lives of
eight victims outside St. Jacob’s Church. How are all these nefarious doings
linked together, and what’s the motive behind them all? Van In, who’s not
capable of razor-sharp focus at the best of times (From Bruges with Love, 2015, etc.), is sorely
distracted by his wife, Hannalore Martens, who’s about to give birth any
minute; by Saartje Maes, a pesky reporter who’s attached herself like a
barnacle to the case; and by Hannelore’s not implausible suspicion that the
reporter has her eye on her husband.

The Satanists remain unsatisfyingly shadowy to the bitter end,
but Aspe provides both a wholly unexpected culprit and the perfect setup for the
moment in which his police hero finally becomes a father.

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